US Makes Statement on Arab Crisis

We call on all the dictators we supported for decades to heed the cries of their people for democracy

Gaddafi Set to Star as Nero in Quo Vadis Remake

The burning question is, will he sing?

The Red Shoes

In a tweet last year, Roger Ebert wrote:

"The Red Shoes plays on TCM tonight. A film more or less everyone should see. That probably means you."

And he's right.

For some reason, despite its reputation (perhaps because of its reputation), I had always avoided this film, the most famous of a whole series made by British duo Powell and Pressburger in the 40s and 50s.

The Red Shoes draws the viewer in in a way that the Oscar-nominated Black Swan never manages to do. It does this, too, without relying on tricks and by taking risks, such as inserting a 17-minute uninterrupted ballet sequence in the middle of the action.

Yet "action" is a misleading word to use of this film, despite the numerous dance sequences, because it is essentially the story of obsession – a young dancer's desire to dance and, more darkly, an impressario's desire to control, the desire for dominion.

Played with the type of menacing power that is all the more powerful for being understated, Anton Walbrook's Boris Lermontov is a man with with no heart, the type of person one might be hoodwinked into thinking doesn't exist today. Hoodwinked, for the simple reason that most of us tend not to spend sufficient time in an exclusive relationship with a single controlling individual with no capacity for feeling. Perhaps, though, I am wrong; the divorce petitions for "mental cruelty" might suggest so.

It's easy to miss, but there’s an important scene quite early in the piece where Lermontov blanks Moira Shearer's character, Victoria Page, walking past her as if she doesn't exist, even though he has already met her and spoken with her at some length.

It's a small touch, but it is indicative of the type of man that Lermontov is and a sign to the audience of the ultimate fate of any fully human and vulnerable being that chooses to place themselves under his tutelage. They will have sold their soul.

Salaries Tax Waived as HK Government Withdraws Asian Games Bid

Well, who knows? On Sunday morning, as I made my way towards The Press Room for the world's slimmest brunch (more anon), my progress was held up first by a black Alphard with a police escort proceeding at a funereal pace displaying "Give tax rebate of HK$10,000" and "Waive salaries tax for a year" stickers, and then by a ragtag mob of masochists staggering along on the 24th of their 26-mile jog/walk along Hong Kong's roads. (I tip my hat to the smart 10,200 out of the 60,000 "entrants" who never actually made it to the start line, let alone the finish line).

And then. And then, as if these two omens were not enough, this morning I am sent this "Letter to the editor" by an anonymous source at my daughter's school, telling me it has received 29/30 in an English assessment.

Just what are they teaching our children these days, I want to know, and who is corrupting our youth with their cynical, non-conformist, un-Confucian views?

Dear Sir/Madam,

I write in response to the recent heated debates regarding our city hosting the 2023 Asian Games. As a citizen of Hong Kong, I am made quite anxious by our government's decision to take on responsibility for such a big occasion. And I firmly believe that having our city host this event would not only waste a large amount of money and space, but would also fail to meet the government's actual aim for hosting the Games – to encourage Hong Kong citizens to be more active and to participate in more sporting activities.

Hong Kong people being more active? Were they ever even "active" in the first place? It's a sad but obvious truth, but Hong Kong people have just never had the same enthusiasm for sport English, American or Australian people have. A good example of that would be from the 2009 East Asian Games which Hong Kong hosted. How many people attended that? The stadiums were completely empty most of the time. The government even ended up having to distribute free tickets to the public, just to save its embarrassment. The government claims hosting the event would revitalise people's interest in sporting activities, but how so? If people have never experienced sport on an individual or team basis, why would watching an unfamiliar event suddenly enthuse them with a love of sport?

The total amount of money spent on the 2009 East Asian Games was around HK$240 million. For the 2023 Asian Games, the government originally gave an estimate of HK$6 billion. A little later, following protests at this exorbitant figure, the government pulled a rabbit from the hat by announcing that the costs would now be HK$500 million, or 12 times less than the original estimate. Given the enormous difference between the first and final sum, even moderately intelligent Hong Kong people began to wonder if the government knew what it was doing. The suspicion remains that the powers-that-be view the Games as a way of keeping the working classes in employment for 10 years through vast infrastructural projects.

To really fulfil the aim of creating more active Hong Kong people, I believe hosting the 2023 Asian Games would do no help whatsoever. Instead, perhaps renting out public sporting facilities for free, or organising more district sporting competitions would easily do the job, and not cost a whopping HK$500 million.

Yours sincerely,
Victoria Page
Creative Secondary School

"Creative"?! Western pollution, more like. Where is Peter Lok of Heng Fa Chuen when you need him?

Frenchman Enjoys Own Irony

Ze English … zey are – how you say? – so arrogant?

Suite for Corned Beef Can Opener and Cardboard Cutter

Last Sunday, we decided it was time to replace our two-piece suite in the living room. Like much else in our flat, these items of furniture were thrown in for free by the vendor, who appeared to subscribe to the widely-held local view that second-hand stuff isn't worth much, even when it's your own. Which is strange when you think about it, because at least you know where it's been.

Anyway, unlike our BiF table, which he told us had set him back HK$8,000, which appears to be indestructible – even if it's made a fair old mess of the floor – our black leather sofa and armchair were begin to fray at the seams. More particularly, the elastic under the cushion on the armchair was beginning to go, puzzlingly, as it is the place where I usually sit of an evening.

So it was off to the local IKEA for us and, as luck would have it, they had each of the items we were looking for, a 4-seater sofa (or 3.5 seater as the Swedes prefer to call it) and an armchair for 1.5 persons. Yes, they have them too which is ideal for us, as my daughter and I like to sit together when we're watching the football of a Saturday night and hurling abuse at the referee, and – if the other one's team is playing – the other one's team.

The salesman was a cut above the average Hong Kong drone, advising us, when we gave him our address that our building's lift doors were very narrow and that we'd better check the dimensions. We did this when we got home, only to discover that the height of the sofa was 2 centimetres greater than the width of the lift door opening.

We phoned the shop and they told us the warehouse would call us back. After my wife put the phone down, I remembered that the settee we’d chosen was mounted on little wooden legs, and that, since this was IKEA, these must be detachable. Sure enough, when the warehouse phoned, they confirmed this and we reckoned we'd be fine.

Well, we reckoned right. On Wednesday evening, as arranged, the assembler from IKEA arrived, lugging three large boxes. Out came that key-like tool resembling an oversized implement for opening a can of corned beef (why on earth do they make them that shape?), without which no IKEA artefact can be put together, and, with just a bit of help from the driver, who suddenly appeared on the scene, our new light beige sofa set was adorning our living room.

That's when the fun started. We'd also paid the Swedes HK$200 to have our two old pieces removed and taken to the landfill in Junk Bay (so now we know how it got its name), where New Zealander language teachers gather like vultures to pick off the richest pickings and haul them off to their shacks in Peng Chau and Lamma Island.

The old 1.5 seater went in fine, but the old 3.5 seater just wouldn't fit, whichever way it was rotated. The pint-sized delivery boy cum assembler was as patient and understanding as someone who’d just been slipped a hundred Hong Kong dollars is liable to be in the circumstances, but there seemed nothing we could do except leave it on the 16th floor lift lobby and wait for all hell to break loose when the security mastiffs reached this level on their nocturnal patrol.

Eager to help, my daughter suggested a chainsaw – which worried me, as I didn’t think she knew what one was, and reckoned she must have been watching The Texas Cheerleader Chainsaw Massacre on that dodgy Mainland movie site when she’d been telling us she was checking out the Oscar contenders.

But that gave me the idea.

"Why not rip the arm off?" I suggested to the little fellow.

And rip it off he did, with a bit of help from our "toolbox" – a fancy name for the canvas shopping bag which holds a few Phillips screwdrivers, assorted nails, a pair of pliers, tubes of glue that you can’t use because they've glued their own lids on and some bits of sandpaper. But it does have a cardboard cutter, which is what he wanted.

A few minutes later and the dismembered sofa was in the lift and heading off for the Tseung Kwan O furniture cemetery, ready to break Kiwi hearts.

"That's funny," I said to my wife and daughter. "What happened to the lift? The previous owner got it up here okay all those years ago."

"Daddy," said my daughter in that way she has when she knows she knows more than me (a way I'm becoming more and more familiar with). "They renovated the lifts two or three years ago and must have put in a false ceiling."

Conceding this, I could only reflect on the heated conversations the security mastiffs must periodically have with angry long-term residents when they move out ... or buy new stuff from the Swedes.

Unrest Spreads to Jordan

Baaastard!

Neer Gie a Glaswegian* a Glasgow Kiss

Milan thug, and ex football player, Gennaro Gattuso, tried it on Joe Jordan, but he may well live to regret it. (The blow is delivered after 5 secs.)

Joe "Jaws" Jordan

An Italian

Bizarrely, each of these monsters has played for AC Milan and each has played for Scottish clubs.

* Close enough - he's from North Lanarkshire. And I'm not going to argue the point.

Chinese Morality Plays

One only has to have a smattering of Chinese or a fleeting acquaintance with the culture to know that Chinese people love their morality tales, although, as a cynic might note, an individual's love of moral tales may be in inverse proportion to the morality he practices in his private life.

Certainly, much of the fun in everyday tales of mega-rich families in Hong Kong falling apart (whether it be the Sun Hung Kai Kwoks, the Macau Hos or the Chinachem Wangs) is waiting and watching as each side attempts to wrest the moral high ground from the other in the public, frequently legal, fallout.

Sadly, but almost inevitably given the fact that churches in Hong Kong are one of the playthings of the rich - not to mention, the willing recipients of their largesse, competing for a slice of the pie with the opera, the ballet, the Philharmonic Orchestra and the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals - Christianity is regularly invoked as family members fight for the lion's share of the enormous fortunes that can be amassed by building boxes 60 storeys in the air or exploiting the Chinese compulsion to gamble.

The most recent example of this phenomenon was also one of the best, as Nina Wang's brother made a complete fool of himself by calling upon his sister's ex lover and feng shui man, Tony Chan, to "repent and be saved".

In this context, it was perhaps not entirely unexpected that I should receive a phone call from an old colleague, who I hadn't heard from since we were both working at Hong Kong University. Now in-house legal counsel for a large local grocery outfit, she felt she had to share an email that the Chairman – one of that distinctively Hong Kong breed of Christians who spends a fortune every year on feng shui – had sent to all senior executives after returning from a trip to Rome. He's a Papist, you see.

Being a lawyer, my friend Teresa couldn't be bothered with translating even the gist of the fable herself – being a lawyer, it's a wonder if she'd read it – but told me helpfully that I would enjoy it if I got my secretary to do the honours.

As I read the translation painstakingly prepared by Brenda, I felt a very strong sense of déja-vu. This was sounding very much like the stuff my daughter used to bring back from Christ Church Kindergarten. By the time I got to the end, I could almost recite the moral word for word.

"This is wisdom: morality can make up the deficit of your stupidity, but your intelligence cannot make up the deficit of your immorality."

And of course there was the nod to numerology, without which these things are never complete. In this case, the magic number was "4":

"There are 4 things that cannot be reversed:

A stone thrown
Words said
Time passed
An opportunity missed."

The last word must go to Teresa, herself a graduate of Maryknoll Convent School, who concluded her email to me as follows,

"It's just as well the Koran wasn't written in Chinese; there's only so much even a Muslim can take.”

Judges Don’t Buy Tony Chan’s Appeal

It's not about the money

The King's Speech

In my childhood I used to listen to my father talk about the Second World War, which started when he was 12 and ended when he was 18. One of the memories of those talks that always remained with me was of the sacrifices made by King George VI after the abdication of his toerag of a brother David. As my father told it, it was the story of a man who never expected to be, and never wanted to be king, whose health was broken by the strain of wartime leadership, and, especially, by the burden placed on a shy and retiring man of making speeches to galvanise and uplift the nation when he suffered from a stammer.

Watching The King's Speech was therefore nostalgia at one remove for me, as the story I had heard so much about wss reenacted on the screen, with the addition of one important, and for me, previously unknown, element - the help that the king had received from a speech therapist to help him manage, if not completely overcome, his speech impediment.

In spite of taking one or two liberties with what is known of the relationship between the Duke of York (as he was when he first met his therapist ten years before acceding to the throne) and Lionel Logue, this film is a triumph for one of the cinema's finest character actors, Geoffrey Rush, and for Colin Firth, who finally throws off his Darcy mantle.

It is a measure of the film-makers' confidence in the two protagonists that of all the principal players in this drama, they are the only two who look nothing like the people they play. (While no one watching the film apart from his own family would know what Logue looked like, every person of a certain age in Britain knows that George VI was frail and gaunt.)

For this is no ordinary biopic, and physical resemblance is of no importance compared to the key messages the film wishes to convey: the agonies of the king and the relationship that developed between two men, who had both known what it was to be considered failures, but who both grasped their moment when it came.

This is a shamelessly sentimental film, but how can that be wrong when the depth of the sentiment it aims to communicate is so real? See this film.

A Match Made in Heaven

Watching the head honcho of Hong Kong's rural terrorists, the Heung Yee Kuk's Lau Wong Fat, on the telly last night dispensing favours to his minions and others he holds in thrall, my mind began wandering from the surreal world of blokes who are given enormous payouts from the latter group (also known as the Hong Kong Government) because a great-grandfather was purported to be living in Yuen Long in 1898 to a former representative of said government who made his name through his own munificence in Hong Kong's far-flung highlands and islands.

David Akers-Jones, or Sir David to give him his full title, is assured of a place in history as architect of Hong Kong's Small House Policy, which altered the landscape of the New Territories for ever, as paddy fields and 1960s Mao-style dwellings gave way to container dumps and three-storey Spanish style villas in shocking pink.

Just the other week Sir David popped up again in a photo shoot for the launch of his friend Regina Ip Suk Yee’s latest plaything – as she waits patiently in the wings for her coronation as Hong Kong's next (but one?) Chief Executive – the New People's Party.

Now, as Sir David pointed out when he was grilled a few years ago about his role in the change of zoning of Discovery Bay back in the 1970s (he testified that the project had been given to new developers because it was feared DB would fall into the hands of the Russians – one can't make this stuff up), he's an old chap and probably fully deserving of a quiet retirement in what's left of the New Territories.

But, I wonder, is there one more service he can perform for the place he has called home for more than 50 years since first arriving here as a fresh-faced Tommy in the last days of the war?

One has only to listen to them speak for a few seconds to know that Regina and Ah Fat are a match made in heaven. Who better than Sir David to bring them together?

Thatcher Breaks Silence on Streep Biopic

Meryl who?

Black Swan

The much hyped Black Swan is a film that can't decide what it wants to be. Part documentary of the tough life of a ballerina, part study in obsession and borderline insanity, part mom and daughter flick, part psychological thriller, part porn film, part movie version of Tchaikovsky's ballet, this effort is sadly less than the sum of its many parts.

Perhaps they should have injected some comedy into it. In the closing scene, Natalie Portman, playing the Swan Queen, leaps from a staircase to her doom. Actually, without wanting to give too much away, her doom has already been sealed, but since no one else in the theatre seems to notice that she's eviscerated herself, I guess we can gloss over that little problem.

No, what they should have done is to have replaced the mattress she does her back-flip onto with a trampoline. That way she could have come bouncing back up into view, complete with blood-stained tutu, just as happened at the end of a production of Tosca, when the absurdity of the thing got too much for the stagehands.

Next up The King's Speech, in which Colin Firth seizes the opportunity afforded by the abdication of an elder brother with fascist sympathies to give up the good life playing Darcy in favour of playing a guy with a speech defect and finally snaring the Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role .

Aftertaste

Well worth a visit if you're in Mei Foo is a cha chaan teng called Aftertaste ('though you won't find the name on any sign – they dug it up for me from an insurance document). The Chinese name is 回味小館 and it's just 30 yards from Exit A of the MTR station – on the right opposite an HSBC personal service place.

For HK$29 you get a choice of three very decent set lunches each day (some of them quite exotic by chaan teng standards) plus some truly execrable coffee. I see it's been savaged at Openrice, but what do critics know?

The film snobs at Rotten Tomatoes have all turned their noses up at Little Fockers. Good on the 4% of top critics who were brave enough to give the thumbs up to the latest Stiller/De Niro Meet the Parents sequel, which is a lot better than the middle one (Meet the Fockers), where Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand were given way too much airtime.

Better than the hyper-pretentious Brazil any day.

HKJC Beas River Handicap Paperchase

Last week I had to play tennis at the Hong Kong Jockey Club's swanky retreat in the northern New Territories, "Beas River". Having never been there before, I checked out the HKJC website and printed off the directions I needed, i.e. those for the last bit after you leave the Fanling Highway.

All went well until I got to Step 14. The caption for this photo contains the first hint that something is amiss by telling you to "continue along Castle Peak Road and follow the sign (sic) for The Hong Kong Jockey Club". Surely one is never going to be enough? But nothing can prepare you for the trick that the Jockey Club plays on the driver in the next step. Or, rather, the missing step.

For, they completely miss out the most crucial junction of the lot, the right turn onto Kwu Tung Road. All of which means that the driver continues to steam down Castle Peak Road towards Yuen Long, since Step 15 clearly indicates that the next turn will be a left turn.

The Jockey Club pile Pelion on Ossa by sticking their one sign for "The Hong Kong Jockey Club" at the junction of Castle Peak Road and Kwu Tong Road only for the benefit of drivers coming from Yuen Long, i.e. you only see a sign at all when you've got lost, turned round and are driving back towards Fanling.

Fortunately, I've been to the golf course at Fanling a number of times, so I knew that Beas River, being adjacent to the golf course, couldn't be in Yuen Long. Less fortunately, one of our party for the HKTA mixed doubles league match didn't know this and she went round in circles, finally making it after a two-hour journey. What would have happened had she not been a Cantonese speaker, I shudder to think.

So, I have a Lunar New Year suggestion for my fellow blogger EB (known to you as Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges), which I've been kind enough to email him in person, in case he misses it here. Actually, I have two suggestions, so that he can adopt the one he thinks adds the most value.

Either A) sort out your website and your signage, or B) replace "Step" with "Fence", because getting to your place at Beas River is akin to riding in the Grand National. You're a racing man, Winfried. Perhaps you could call Fence 14A the Water Jump in honour of the phantom obstacle that Dick Francis and Devon Loch attempted to negotiate in 1956?

On that note, may I wish Kung Hei Fat Choi to all my readers, and I'll be back with more riveting stuff on Monday 7 February.

Reap What You Ho

Hong Kong is a baffling place at times. A place where a bloke marries four wives and then wonders why the wheels start falling off when the various constituent members of the harem start forming alliances and plotting to grab all his cash when he's about to snuff it. Did "reap what you sow" ever have a better exemplification?

Next, I walk into Wellcome and am confronted with a discount yellow label for a bottle of Baron Philippe de Rothschild plonk where the price that's been struck through in favour of the promotional price (HK$99.0) is actually lower than the promotional price itself (HK$109.00).

And then, just this morning, I am travelling along behind a motorbike (registration number LG 2497, in case you're a reader) and he's stuck this sign up in the place where they normally stick the L plate.

Look, mate, if you're going to stick a sign up that says "Keep Distance", the only road users who're going to be able to read it when you're in motion are your fellow motorcyclists, as they're the only twats who travel on the bumper of the vehicle in front.

Unless, of course, you want the human beings who drive cars, trucks and buses, as well as the alien life forms who surround themselves in the armour of triad vans and minibuses, to get so close to your machine while motoring that they can actually read your silly sign.